Kent State, May 4, 1970: America Kills Its Children

Twenty-five years ago this month, students came out on the Kent
State campus and scores of others to protest the bombing of Cambodia--
a decision of President Nixon's that appeared to expand the Vietnam
War. Some rocks were thrown, some windows were broken, and an
attempt was made to burn the ROTC building.
Governor James Rhodes sent in the National Guard.

The units that responded were ill-trained and came right from riot duty
elsewhere; they hadn't had much sleep. The first day, there was some brutality;
the Guard bayonetted two men, one a disabled veteran, who had cursed
or yelled at them from cars. The following day, May 4th, the Guard,
commanded with an amazing lack of military judgment,
marched down a hill, to a field in the middle of angry demonstrators,
then back up again. Seconds before they would have passed around the corner
of a large building, and out of sight of the crowd, many of the
Guardsmen wheeled and fired directly into the students, hitting thirteen,
killing four of them, pulling the trigger over and over, for thirteen seconds.
(Count out loud--one Mississippi, two Mississippi, to see how long this is.)
Guardsmen--none of whom were later punished, civilly, administratively,
or criminally--admitted firing at specific unarmed targets; one man shot
a demonstrator who was giving him the finger. The closest student shot
was fully sixty feet away; all but one were more than 100 feet away;
all but two were more than 200 feet away. One of the dead was
255 feet away; the rest were 300 to 400 feet away. The most distant student
shot was more than 700 feet from the Guardsmen.

Some rocks had been thrown, and some tear gas canisters fired by the
Guard had been hurled back, but (though some of the Guardsmen certainly
must know the truth) no-one has ever been able to establish why the
Guard fired when they were seconds away from safety around the
corner of the building. None had been injured worse than a minor
bruise, no demonstrators were armed, there was simply nothing
threatening them that justified an armed and murderous response.
In addition to the demonstrators, none of whom was closer than
sixty feet, the campus was full of onlookers and students on their
way to class; two of the four dead fell in this category. Most Guardsmen
later testified that they turned and fired because everyone else was.
There was an attempt to blame a mysterious sniper, of whom no trace
was ever found; there was no evidence, on the ground, on still
photographs or a film, of a shot fired by anyone but the Guardsmen.
One officer is seen in many of the photographs, out in front, pointing
a pistol; one possibility is that he fired first, causing the others,
ahead of him, to turn and fire. Or (as some witnesses testified)
he or another officer may have given an order to fire. It is
indisputable that the Guardsmen were not in any immediate physical
danger when they fired; the crowd was not pursuing them; they were
seconds away from being out of sight of the demonstration.

There was also an undercover FBI informant, Terry Norman, carrying
a gun on the field that day. Though he later turned his gun into the
police, who announced it had not been fired, later ballistic tests
by the FBI showed that it had been fired since it was last cleaned--
but by then it was too late to determine whether it had been fired before
or on May 4th.

It would be too charitable to say that the investigation was botched; there
was no investigation. Even the New York City police, who are themselves
prone to brutality and corruption, do a better job. Every time an
officer discharges his weapon, it is taken from him, and there
is an investigation. Here--to the fatal detriment of the federal
criminal trial which followed--it was never conclusively established
which Guardsmen had fired, or which of them had shot the wounded and the
dead. Since all were wearing gas masks, it is impossible to identify
them in pictures (many had also removed or covered their name tags,
a classic ploy of law enforcement officers about to commit brutality
in the '60's and '70's), and though many confessed to having fired
their weapons, none admitted to being in the first row and therefore,
among the first to fire. The ballistic evidence could have helped here,
but none was taken.

One rumor has it that the Guardsmen were told the same night that
they would never be prosecuted by the state of Ohio. And they never
were. The Nixon administration stalled for years, announcing
"investigations" that led nowhere; White House tapes subsequently
released show that Nixon thought demonstrators were bums, asked
the Secret Service to go beat them up, and apparently felt that
the Kent State victims had it coming. As did most of the
country; William Gordon calls
the killings "the most popular murders ever committed in the
United States."

The history of the next few years is very sad. A federal prosecution
was finally brought, but the presiding judge is said to have signalled
his preference for the defendants, guiding their attorney's conduct
of the case to help them avoid legal errors. He dismissed all charges
at the close of the prosecution's case, avoiding the need for a defense and
taking the case away from the jury. Among his reasons: a failure
to prove specific intent to deprive the victims of their civil rights;
due to the lack of any investigation, it was almost impossible at this
late date to show which Guardsmen shot which victim.

In the New York City police force, which is far from perfect, officers
who have killed or injured someone under questionable circumstances
are often dismissed from the force even though there is not
enough evidence for a criminal conviction; the standard of proof is
not the same for an administrative action as for a criminal case.
You don't want an unstable, sadistic person on the force, even though
there may not be enough evidence for a criminal conviction.
But the Guardsmen--even the one who confessed to shooting an unarmed
demonstrator giving him the finger--were not deemed unfit to serve the
State, even though they had fired indiscriminately into a crowd
containing many passsersby and students on their way to classes.

A civil suit brought by the wounded students and the parents of the dead ones
deteriorated among infighting by the plaintiffs' lawyers. Unable to
agree on a single theory of the case, they contradicted each other.
The jury returned a verdict for the defendants.

This verdict was overturned on appeal--the main ground was that the judge did not
take seriously enough the attempted coercion of a juror who was
assaulted by a stranger demanding an unspecified verdict--and a retrial
was scheduled. On the eve of it, the exhausted plaintiffs settled with the
state for $675,000.00, which was divided 13 ways. Half of it went
to Dean Kahler, the most seriously wounded survivor, and only
$15,000 apiece went to the families of each of the slain students,
a pathetically small verdict in a day when lives are accounted to be worth in the
many millions of dollars. The state issued a statement of "regret"
which stopped short of an apology for the events of May 4th, nine
years before.

I write this just a week after the Kansas city bombing that appears to have taken
200 lives (the rescuers are still searching the wreckage) and the
theme today is the same as 25 years ago. Hate was in the air then,
as it is today. Admittedly, the First Amendment protects hate speech,
whether it comes from the most marginal extremist or the highest public
official. Demonizing someone else for their beliefs or their race,
or even calling for their immediate assassination, is legal in
America today and was twenty-five years ago. But the fact that
something is legal to do does not make it right to do, or
relieve the speaker of any moral responsibility for the
consequences.

President Nixon created a public atmosphere in which students
who opposed the war were fair game for those who supported
the government. In the week following Kent State, construction
workers rioted on Wall Street, attacking antiwar demonstrators
and sending many to the hospital, some permanently crippled.
It was reported at the time that, a day or two after the deaths,
President Nixon called the parents of the only slain student known
to be a bystander--he was a member of ROTC--to express condolences.
The phone never rang in the other parents' houses. The message
couldn't have been clearer: they had it coming.

I was fifteen that year, raised in a very comfortable middle class
environment and very naive. Kent State was my political
education. What I discovered that week, and that year, was
that America in those times was perfectly willing to harass, beat
and kill its own children if they disagreed with government policy.
The step from being a member of the protected American mainstream
to being a marginalized outsider, not entitled to the protection
of law enforcement and fair prey to any violent, flag-waving bully
who happened to pass, was to stand up and say you did not believe
the Vietnam war was right.

I am not sure that anyone too young to remember those times can
really appreciate what it was like. We know today the extent to
which the FBI was involved in dirty tricks, illegal wiretapping
and burglaries against even moderate antiwar organizations.
Prior to Kent State, I had joined an organization called Student
Mobilization Against the War. One day, their offices were
burglarized and their membership lists stolen. We had no doubt at
the time that it was the government, and we were right.

I led demonstrations that week outside my high school protesting
the Kent State killings and, afterwards, the principal
summoned me and my father to his office and threatened to have
me expelled as a trouble-maker. My father--I am very proud of him,
as he was not an ideological man and his opposition to the war was
very muted--replied that if I was expelled, he would fight it
"all the way to the Supreme Court." I had done nothing else than
exercise my First Amendment right of protest. We heard nothing
more about expulsion, but a close friend of mine, who didn't
have an assertive parent to stand up for him, was thrown out of
school.

That week, people came out of the woodwork--wearing black leather, chains
wrapped around their fists, waving American flags--people we
had never before seen in our neighborhoods. These patriots
set up a counterdemonstration across the street from ours.
For hours, a rumor was rampant that they would attack us
and that the police would not intervene--exactly what had happened
on Wall Street a day or so before. Their cursing and chain-rattling
became uglier until finally they summoned their courage and charged.
Someone shouted "Link arms!" and five or six teenagers, me among
them, joined to interpose our bodies between the attackers and
demonstrators. The Brooklyn police, unlike those on Wall Street,
or the National Guard in Kent days earlier, did not seek or condone the
killing of children. They ran in and forced the attackers back.
I was fifteen then and am forty now, but I have never had a finer
moment in my life. It was the only moment in my life that I came close
to living up to Gandhi's statement that "we must be the change we wish to
see in the world."

Here are the names of those who died at
Kent State, so that they may not be forgotten:

ALISON KRAUSE

JEFFREY MILLER

SANDRA SCHEUER

WILLIAM SCHROEDER

My source for many of the details in this essay is William
A. Gordon, Four Dead in Ohio (North Ridge Books, 1995.)